Newspaper Reader comments.
Oct 21, 2024
The first two paragraphs are steeped in the standard self-congratulation of Mr. Ganesh. He can’t quite get over his own cleverness, and wants The Reader to share in his self-revelation: ending in a superfluous question, that mimics conversation.
“A fight between two bald men over a comb”, was how Jorge Luis Borges described the Falklands war. What a line: somehow cruel and humane all at once. It has survived these four decades because it really is unimprovable in its Wildean economy.
What a shame it is nonsense. In that war, a junta was violently infringing the right of some islanders to self-determination. Or a faded empire was willing to kill over some faraway and ill-begotten territories. Or a little of both. At any rate, it mattered. Wider principles were involved. Defusing the whole subject with an epigram is a mark of high cultivation, but also of evasiveness. In the end — and this isn’t aimed at the late writer so much as at those who thoughtlessly quote him — where do you stand?
The Reader has arrived at the two imperatives Mr. Ganesh’s intervention liberals and woke-ism that evolves argumentatively into a kind of political miniature that lends itself to ‘Ganesh Analysis’.
Editor: Reader examine the evolution/de-evolution of the actors in this concoction!
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Not all liberals deserted. Malcolm Gladwell and others signed a Harper’s Magazine letter about creative freedom when that took some fibre
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But who led the resistance when it was hardest? Single-issue feminists. Rightwing free speech zealots. Political casuals with a radar for humbug.
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Editor: The full blossoming of his argument:
Woke is exaggerated by conservatives (which doesn’t say where one stands on the issue), a distraction from economic injustice (which doesn’t say where one stands on the issue) or the wrong way of winning people over (a piece of tactical counsel from Barack Obama that didn’t, quite, say where he stood on the issue).
As with the old line about the Falklands, you could smell the desperation to avoid an argument. It is understandable. But it also ill-equips liberals for the protection of liberalism.
Editor: As if by prestidigitation Richard Dawkins appears, and dominates the remainder of Ganesh’s crowded, convoluted, confused attempt at a essay. I offer The Reader some samples: In Hip-Hop, the Sample is a way of adding other dimensions to a Musical Composition, and as an homage to that already existing work. Though Ganesh’s intervention exists in an alternative dimension!
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Most of us can recite the main tenets of his Enlightenment outlook. Religious claims about the workings of the universe are either wrong or unfalsifiable.
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What is the liberal line? The one that dogs him as much as criticism from clerics?
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And then the ultimate midwit dinner party cliché, the verbal equivalent of having a Banksy print on your wall: “Atheism has become a religion in itself.”
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The eternal mistake is to conflate liberalism, a set of specific beliefs, involving trade-offs and hard choices, with what we might call liberality: an openness of spirit, a generalized niceness.
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Editor: Here are the final paragraphs of Mr. Ganesh political/moral ramblings that pass as informed comment:
I write all this as someone who wants milquetoast liberals in charge almost all the time. But in a crunch moment? When core freedoms are on the line? We’re too flaky. You need cranks and single-issue fanatics. You need people who take abstract ideas to their conclusion. In order to recognise and fight extremism, it helps, I think, to possess at least a trace element of it. (Dawkins would be awesome in a crisis.)
It has become fashionable to tease conservatives, such as the Tory member of parliament Kemi Badenoch, for pounding away at a woke movement that is now fading. Fair enough. But it isn’t fading because of what the sensible centre did. For the most part, their contribution was to stroll up to the pub brawl and tut just as it was petering out.
Where do we stand? At a safe distance.
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